Posts Tagged ‘government spending’

Here’s a new Pew poll that should depress anyone who knows how to balance their checkbook. The poll shows Americans oppose spending cuts for government . . . in every area — even for foreign aid.

48 percent support cuts for foreign aid. So almost half think foreign aid should be cut. That’s the lone ray of hope in this poll. But with that lone exception, support for spending cuts doesn’t reach 35 percent . . . for anything else.

So all these people who oppose any and all spending cuts must include a lot of people who regularly vote Republican, voted for Romney. Go figure.

Only 20 percent support cuts for farm subsidies (which mostly go to giant agribusiness). Just 21 percent support cuts for Solyndra-style energy subsidies and the U.S. Department of Energy — which should be renamed the Department of Energy Prevention.

The U.S. Department of Energy produces zero energy, just prevents energy from being produced.

Similarly, the U.S. Department of Education should be renamed the Department of Education Prevention.

Does anyone think the quality of education in America has improved since the U.S. Department of
Education was formed under President Jimmy Carter in 1979?

The national debt stands at $16.6 TRILLION. We have trillion-dollar annual deficits as far as the eye can see. The federal government now borrows 40 cents of every dollar it spends.

Every baby born in America today now owes $52,834 on the national debt.

We’ve just added a gigantic new entitlement program (the largest entitlement program of all time for America) with ObamaCare.

So government spending is just going to get even more out-of-control, if that’s even imaginable.

In terms of our national debt, we’re already in worse shape than Greece. Our only advantage is we can just print up more money, like confetti. Greece can’t because it’s part of the European Union.

But the American people see no problem with any of this. They want to spend more, not less . . . just like Obama.

CNS: There were only 1.75 full-time private-sector workers in the United States last year for each person receiving benefits from Social Security, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Social Security board of trustees.

That means that for each husband and wife who worked full-time in the private sector last year there was a Social Security recipient somewhere in the country taking benefits from the federal government.

WASHINGTON POST: Standard & Poor’s announced Friday night that it has
downgraded the United States credit rating for the first time, dealing a huge symbolic blow to the world’s economic superpower in what was a sharply worded critique of the American political system.

Lowering the nation’s rating one-notch below AAA, the credit rating company said “political brinkmanship” in the debate over the debt had made the U.S. government’s ability to manage its finances “less stable, less effective and less predictable.” It said the bi-partisan agreement reached this week to find at least $2.1 trillion in budget savings “fell short” of what was necessary to tame the nation’s debt over time and predicted that leaders would not be likely to achieve more savings later on.

The decision came after a day of furious back-and-forth between the Obama administration and S&P. Government officials fought back hard, arguing that S&P made a flawed analysis of the potential for political agreement and had mathematical errors in its initial report, which was submitted to the Treasury earlier in the day. The company had overstated the U.S. deficit over 10 years by $2 trillion, officials said.

WASHINGTON TIMES: It might not be the beginning of a Chinese tea party movement, but some citizens are railing about bureaucratic waste as the Communist Party releases some details about government spending.

Internet-savvy Chinese are using social networking to share their complaints about extravagant government spending. Even the state-controlled media are starting to grumble. Caijing magazine called for the government to prosecute bureaucrats who still ignore the June 30 deadline for reporting on some expenses.

“They just don’t have a sense of how much money they’re spending,” said Liang Xiaoqin, a Chinese college student from Nanjing.

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Gripped by fear of another recession, the financial markets suffered their worst day Thursday since the crisis of 2008. The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 500 points, its ninth-steepest decline ever.

The sell-off wiped out the Dow’s gains for 2011. It put the Dow and broader stock indexes into what investors call a correction — down 10 percent from the highs of this spring.

“We are continuing to be bombarded by worries about the global economy,” said Bill Stone, the chief investment strategist for PNC Financial.

The day was reminiscent of the wild swings that defined the markets during the crisis three years ago. Gold prices briefly hit a record high, oil fell an extraordinary $5 a barrel, and frightened investors were so desperate to get into some government bonds that they were willing accept almost no return on their money.

Actually, there are no spending cuts at all, ever, period

This chart shows why federal spending never goes down under any plan.

The Ryan plan boasts $6.2 trillion in savings over 10 years. So that takes the projected national debt in 2021 from about $28 trillion all the way down to $22 trillion.

So we get a $22 trillion debt under the Ryan Plan . . . 10 years from now — instead of the $28 trillion debt Obama wants to give us.

Doesn’t sound like much of a plan to me.

And this is Paul Ryan’s chart.

So there’s really not a whole lot of difference between the Ryan budget plan and Obama’s spendaholism. Yet Dems, such as Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, call Ryan’s plan economic terrorism against the elderly and the poor.

The best we can say about the Ryan plan is that it’s a little bit less worse than the Obama budget.

So . . . not so good.

I like Paul Ryan. He’s a really smart dude. But we can do better than this.

RUSH: Well, the Senate is prepared to vote on the bill. It’s a fait accompli. It is going to happen, and depending on where you look, everybody’s claiming to be winners, and in other places you look everybody’s claiming to be losers. If everybody lost, it means it’s probably a pretty good deal. If everybody’s unhappy, it’s that line of thinking. I look at this, ladies and gentlemen, and I see an absolute, total waste of effort, a total waste of time. It’s gonna come down now to how dispirited people are and just how much they want to continue to fight for this, because what happened here is typical Washington. It’s the same old, same old. There’s nothing really new in this in the way it all happened when you boil it all down.

We’re gonna reach a new debt limit here today sometime, and then we’re gonna reach another debt limit in three or four months, and then we’re gonna reach another debt limit, and we’re gonna keep spending, and we’re not gonna change the baseline any at all. And we’re gonna be told it’s the best we can do with just one-third of the government, meaning the House of Representatives.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, how many of you believe that there are budget cuts in the new debt ceiling bill? You’ve heard that there are cuts, have you not? We’re cutting here, we’re cutting there. Yeah, well, what I want to know is why would anybody believe that this deal includes any significant cuts in spending? If it really cuts spending, why would we have to raise the debt limit by $2.4 trillion? Why? And we’re still gonna get downgraded, and the markets are still not happy, and all the reasons we were sold for doing this have turned out to be bogus. Vladimir Putin, he’s out hunting. He says the United States is “a parasite on the world economy.” A parasite, meaning our growth is all phony.

It’s all based on borrowing, it isn’t real, and we are gobbling up all the resources around the world just to sustain our spending. We’re really not the rich country that we are is what Putin means. It’s all borrowed, it’s all fake, it’s all phony. We’re parasites. All the numbers in this deal are just government math. Government math’s even crazier than Farrakhan’s Million Man Math Made Easy. Rand Paul has an open letter on his website: To paraphrase Senator Jim DeMint: When you’re speeding toward the edge of a cliff, you don’t set the cruise control. You stop the car. The current deal to raise the debt ceiling doesn’t stop us from going over the fiscal cliff.

“At best, it slows us from going over it at 80 mph to going over it at 60 mph. This plan never balances. The President called for a ‘balanced approach.’ But the American people are calling for a balanced budget. This deal does nothing to fix the overreaches of both parties over the past few years: Obamacare, TARP, trillion-dollar wars, runaway entitlement spending. They are all cemented into place with this deal, and their legacy will be trillions of dollars in new debt. The deal that is pending before us now,” get this, “Adds at least $7 trillion to our debt over the next 10 years.” Not $2.4 trillion; $7 trillion. “The deal purports to ‘cut’ $2.1 trillion, but the ‘cut’ is from a baseline that adds $10 trillion to the debt.”

As you well know, because we’ve been explaining this in easily understandable detail all week. I love the illustration. We could prepare a budget that is a freeze next year that doesn’t spend a dime more than this year, and it would be scored as a nine and a half trillion-dollar cut because of the baseline, because of how the budget is expected to grow. “This deal, even if all targets are met and the Super Committee wields its mandate — results in a BEST case scenario of still adding more than $7 trillion more in debt over the next 10 years. That is sickening.” Folks, I’m gonna give you a little history. I remember when this program started — well, even before it started here, when I was in Sacramento and the show started in 1984 — getting phone calls throughout the years from people concerned about the national debt, and I pooh-poohed it.

I told these people, “You know I’ve been hearing about the national debt my whole life.” My grandfather was telling me about the national debt. My dad told me about the national debt. Everybody talked about the national debt and how it’s gonna consume us one day and it’s outta control, and I said, “I’ve been hearing it for years and years and years, and we’re still here. I’ve been hearing this national debt business for years and years and years, and we’re richer as a nation, and we’re more prosperous than ever.” So I said, “This national debt business? Big deal. We owe it to ourselves, so it’s really not any big deal.” Now, at the time that I was saying that, it was still manageable in size.

WASHINGTON POST: A Republican aide e-mails me: “The Speaker, Sen. Reid and Sen. McConnell all agreed on the general framework of a two-part plan. A short-term increase (with cuts greater than the increase), combined with a committee to find long-term savings before the rest of the increase would be considered. Sen. Reid took the bipartisan plan to the White House and the President said no.”

If this is accurate the president is playing with fire. By halting a bipartisan deal he imperils the country’s finances and can rightly be accused of putting partisanship above all else. The ONLY reason to reject a short-term, two-step deal embraced by both the House and Senate is to avoid another approval-killing face-off for President Obama before the election. Next to pulling troops out of Afghanistan to fit the election calendar, this is the most irresponsible and shameful move of his presidency.

As for the House, why not pass the deal that Sen. Harry Reid agreed to, send it to the Senate and leave town? Enough already.

MICHAEL WALSH-NEW YORK POST: Here’s a joke for you: President Obama nearly bankrupts the country with his out-of-control deficit spending — then demands responsible fiscal leadership from the Republicans.

OK, this is no time for humor: The country faces a deadline of Aug. 2 to either raise the debt ceiling from $14.3 trillion to around $16 trillion or face the prospect of defaulting on our loans and cutting services.

But jokers seem to be all we have in Washington these days, with the president as comedian-in-chief.
Who but a comic could propose (as Obama did back in February) a $3.7 trillion budget that would have added $7.2 trillion more to the national debt by 2021?

Plus . . . these were not jobs we needed. They were make-work jobs. Now the Stimulus is causing jobs to be lost.

WEEKLY STANDARD: When the Obama administration releases a report on the Friday before a long weekend, it’s clearly not trying to draw attention to the report’s contents. Sure enough, the “Seventh Quarterly Report” on the economic impact of the “stimulus,” released on Friday, July 1, provides further evidence that President Obama’s economic “stimulus” did very little, if anything, to stimulate the economy, and a whole lot to stimulate the debt.

The report was written by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama, and it chronicles the alleged success of the “stimulus” in adding or saving jobs. The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.